Thanks to the writings and teachings of so many light workers, from ancient sages and saints of old to contemporary preachers and New Age practitioners, we are inundated with reminders of how vital and transforming it is to have an attitude of gratitude about life. There are journals in which we can document the things for which we are grateful; meditations on gratitude to focus and relax the mind; books and CDs with affirmations and a myriad of processes we can use to remember to be grateful each day. And in this country, we’ve been celebrating a day devoted to Thanksgiving for a couple hundred years.
It’s not a secret anymore. Thankfulness opens the soul to receiving the blessings that are all around us.
As children, at the very least we are taught to say grace before meals and to say our prayers at night before sleeping. One of my favorites is from the Madeline series of children’s books which my daughter and I said before every meal, “We love our bread, we love our butter, but most of all we love each other,” to which we added, “Thank you, God, for our food, Amen.”
As a general rule, we are pretty brief when it comes to giving thanks. When asked to list the things to which we are grateful, we usually include our family, our friends, our home, our health, our food, and for life each day. That just about covers everything. But if gratitude is best enhanced by the feeling of love that accompanies it, listing those general headings provides only a cursory means of expression. We’re only scratching the surface of the many things for which we should be thankful, and the depth of emotion we can muster.
In order to engender the deep sensation of gratitude that enhances the quality of wellbeing and blessings in our lives, we must approach thankfulness with a ferocious specificity. Take time and reflect not just on the thing for which we are grateful but also for the long chain of people and events that brought it into our lives.
When we say thank you for our food, extrapolate each portion of the meal and begin with the source ingredients and proceed through the process that reaches to our plates: the dedicated farmers who raised the chickens that laid the eggs in a clean and healthy environment; the workers who maintained the factories where they are carefully processed and packaged; the management that makes sure the factory operation remains functioning and profitable so that all may be paid for their labor; the trucks that haul the eggs across miles of highways that were designed, built and maintained by so many others to provide ease of transport from countryside to city; the markets that are locally situated, where the eggs are stored for freshness and safety, and presented to us beautifully and carefully packaged so that we may buy them in close proximity to our homes, and all of the people who keep that market operational, so that all we have to do is take them to our kitchens, crack them and eat them.
Think of the immensity of it! The seamless orchestration of a system of food cultivation and delivery which most of us have no hand in save for reaping the benefits to the nourishment of our bodies. Just ponder how much we take for granted every day, that we dismiss with a simple, “thank you for our food.” Then apply this means of profound gratitude to any and every aspect of our lives, and bathe in the ocean of blessings that result.
